Azed 1916/who is Aled J?
Posted by ilancaron on February 22nd, 2009
A typical Azed outing involving quality time with The Big Red Book: a couple of wordplays still to be decoded and the requisite mystery clue. Thanks to Andrew all is clear now!
Across
| 1 | K(V)ETCH |
| 6 | SCOTERS – T in scores* |
| 11 | RONEO – replace middle of Romeo with N for a type of ancient copying machine. |
| 12 | P(HAR,A)OH – rev(rah) in HOP |
| 13 | ARDENTIA VERBA – (air brave Dante)* – Latin for “words that burn”. |
| 14 | PEN NIBS – the well-known compound not in Chambers. They are dipped in ink. PEN is our female swan. |
| 16 | S,AMOS – ref. AMOS the Hebrew prophet. |
| 18 | TILTED – titled (as a lord) with centre shifted. |
| 19 | LATTICELEAF – (a cattle fiel[d])* – it’s a plant from Madagascar. |
| 21 | ARGAN,D – it’s an oil-lamp and ARGAN is an oil-bearing seed (interestingly unrelated). |
| 24 | AD,RED – Spenserian afraid and RED is redd is tidy up. |
| 25 | ELOG(IS)T – incorrectly enumerated as (13, 2 words) and I don’t see anymore how the EIST is generated from “… once failed to gel encompassing lives?” — I think I did last Sunday when I solved it. I guess I didn’t — Andrew points out it’s IS in (to gel)* and an archaic elegist. Whoops. |
| 28 | ANAL RETENTIVE – (trait an eleven)* – a term describing a healthy portion of the people reading this (and yes writing this). |
| 29 | VIRE,TOT – Chaucerian “rush” and VIRE is a financial term describing a kind of transfer to balance a deficit (hmm… can you say electronic vire?) |
| 30 | PEK(O)E – PEKE is our Chinese export (as in pekinese) but PEKOE’s our local tea I guess. |
| 31 | E(SER[a])INE – physostigmine — where EINE is archaic eyes. |
| 32 | ALDERN – Darnel*: related to alder. |
Down
| 1 | KRAB – rev(bark=quest). Short for karabiner. |
| 2 | V(ORP)AL – Lewis Carroll invention for “nonsense”: rev(pro) in rev(lav). |
| 3 | END,A,MAGE – damage and MAGE’s our sorcerer. |
| 4 | TEE,TO,TALLER |
| 5 | HATE – “aversion” – compound anagram where therapist* = (HATE, trips)*. |
| 6 | S,PINK – a PINK is a “small carnation” and SPINK is “cuckoo flower”. |
| 7 | C(H)ANTER – I found this a very difficult clue – pibroch is a bagpipe tune type of thing and a CHANTER is the actual pipe. |
| 8 | TREBLE-DATED – “living three times as long as man”: DATED is “old-fashioned” but can someone help decode TREBLE = “E.g. Aled J., formerly”? Aled Jones is according to Andrew a well-known (… OK…) Welsh treble (singer). |
| 9 | ROB(L)E – L in rev(ebor) — where Ebor is short for Eboracum (York) thus “handicap” I suppose and the whole thing is a type of oak. |
| 10 | S(H)ARDED – H in adder’s* — meaning “sheltered under dung” where midden is a “dunghill”. A dirty clue indeed! (and quite different from how here at Google we use sharded, basically as a synonym for partitioned). |
| 15 | S(TAR*,L)IKE – yes Spenser would have to spell sic (thus “such”) SIKE. |
| 16 | S(EA,W)AVE – EA for “river” and W for “width” and SAVE for “except”. |
| 17 | WIDGEON – (winged, o)* |
| 20 | F(ERV)OR – Obama’s spelling of “fervour” (unlike Clinton he went to Harvard not Oxford) and what he’s inspired. ERV are endogenous retroviruses. |
| 22 | RANIS – hidden in Lutheranism. |
| 23 | FITTE[r] – “what regular exercise makes you?” is FITTER so “mostly” removes the final letter and FITTE is an archaic song, thus “strain for oldies”. |
| 26 | SE(N)A – “Indian army” |
| 27 | ?EEN – our mystery clue: “One’s never given up – even in the last one?” Again Andrew: it’s rev(ne’er=never)=REEN, a ditch, as in a last ditch attempt. At one point, I had considered REEN but I couldn’t make the definition work. Not surprised. |
February 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 am
Hi Ilan, thanks for this.
8dn – Aled Jones was a famous treble when he was a boy, particularly known for singing “Walking in the air”, though he didn’t sing the version in the film of “The Snowman”.
25ac should be ELOGIST – IS in (TO GEL)*
February 22nd, 2009 at 12:26 am
And 27dn is REEN – NE’ER reversed, and it means a ditch, so the reference is to “last ditch attempt”.
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:36 am
7d: in the comment ‘pilbroch’ should be ‘pibroch’.
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Thanks Chunter! (I can see with a name like that you’d have a vested interest in fixing issues having to do with chanter).
February 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Pen-nibs is in earlier editions of Chambers, until at least as recently as 1993, although there is no definition given (its meaning presumably being considered obvious).
March 30th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I had an unusual experience with this one; normally I have to toil quite hard to get off the mark with Azed. But with this one I got KVETCH straight away; instantly. I used the word a few years ago at a chess site: I wrote that David Bronstein is a great player but a terrible kvetch. It’s funny because it was true.